War Cranks

by M. Randal Roberts

The ancient yarn which represents John Bull remarking, “What a glorious day! Let us go out and kill something,” is defective in one important particular. It is not nearly comprehensive enough. The instinct of destruction is no more a peculiarly British characteristic than is the desire to eat and drink. Scientists have the reputation of being the most mild-mannered of men, yet the amount of ingenuity that has been expended by scientific men of every nation under the sun in devising implements for dealing death wholesale in time of war is almost past belief. If one is to credit the accounts given of their inventions by some of these war cranks, the next European war will see such cumbersome weapons as rifles, cannon, and torpedoes completely discarded

“SCIENTISTS HAVE THE REPUTATION OF BEING THE MOST MILD-MANNERED OF MEN.”

in favour of some contrivance or other which will enable its possessor, by merely pressing a button or pulling a string, to annihilate a whole army or an entire fleet. Everyone remembers how just before the Spanish-American war last year Edison was credited with having discovered some means of sweeping the Spaniards off the face of the earth by a diabolical gas. The precise details of this scheme were never made perfectly clear but it was understood that the gas was to be conveyed in a balloon over the heads of the victims, and was to be discharged at the psychological moment when its fumes would infallibly asphyxiate every living thing within a radius of half a dozen miles. This horrible invention, if it ever passes into the region of practical politics, might prove a popular weapon in the hand of Anarchists, but for the damning fact that its use involves the destruction of the man in charge of the balloon as well as his victims.

But it must not be supposed that the implements of every war crank are as visionary as Edison’s gas. In many cases their engines of destruction have been proved by trials, as satisfactory as any trial short of actual warfare can be, to be perfectly workable. A young Swede, Axel Orling by name, came over to London lately to demonstrate the powers of a marvellous invention of his which, he believed, would revolutionise naval warfare. It is as independent of wires as Marconi’s system of telegraphy. To the mere man in the street the feats which Axel Orling claims for his torpedoes savours strongly of legerdemain, but scientific men declare that the theory of the working of this novel machine is perfectly sound. However, theory and practice in the steering of torpedoes, as in other matters, do not always square. It is not east to describe on paper the true inwardness of this invention, but, put briefly, its distinctive feature is the transmitting of motor-power to a torpedo by means of X-rays. The course of an ordinary torpedo can, as everyone knows, be directed by telegraph wires from either the shore or a ship. But the Orling torpedo can be completely controlled without any material connection whatever between it and its controller. The picture of a British admiral standing on the bridge and regulating by a mere wave of the hand the course of a torpedo, in much the same manner as a Japanese juggler regulates the motion of his paper butterflies, is distinctly an impressive one. According to Orling, the only limit to the distance which his torpedo can

“A COUPLE OF DYNAMITE SHELLS WOULD WRECK THE METROPOLIS.”

travel without getting out of hand is the limit of vision. As long as the torpedo continues in sight it can be steered. If a telescope could only be invented capable of bringing New York in sight of Ireland, it would be perfectly easy for a man standing on board a man-of-war in Cork harbour to control the movements of a flotilla of X-ray torpedoes at Sandy Hook. The possibilities opened up by this invention may be left to the imagination of the reader; but it is obvious that the weird machinations of this uncanny torpedo would completely disconcert the most experienced admiral.

The submarine boat has always been a favourite subject with the war crank, and in this line Frenchmen are prominent. A submarine boat which could glide unseen under the hulls of men-of-war, placing nests of melinite or any other high explosive at their most vulnerable points, would play havoc in twenty-four hours with any fleet in the world in time of war. What hampers, however, the practical utility of the submarine boat is the impossibility of steering it. Below the surface, of course, nothing can be seen; while if the steersman is raised above the water the effectiveness of the boat vanishes, it is no longer submarine.

To remedy this defect a Frenchman has now invented a

“THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE STEERING OF TORPEDOES DO NOT ALWAYS SQUARE.”

method of steering a submarine boat by a special sounding apparatus on the bottom, which automatically records changes in level. But before this apparatus can prove of any practical value it would be necessary that an absolutely accurate chart of the bottom of the sea all over the globe must be prepared. As a complete survey of the whole of the bottom of the ocean would be a work of at least a hundred years, it may safely be predicted that no reader of Cassell’s Magazine will be alive when submarine boats steered by the mechanism suggested by this ingenious Frenchman are recognised as practical implements of naval warfare.

Any powerful explosive is dear to the heart of the war crank. Occasionally he busies himself in trying to evolve some new explosive which shall be about a thousand times more powerful than any of the existing ones; but as a rule he is content to take those he finds ready to hand, and to exercise his ingenuity in discovering new and diabolical uses for them. A shell charged with dynamite is
“THE PICTURE IS DISTINCTLY AN IMPRESSIVE ONE.” about as infernal an engine of destruction as can well be conceived. A couple of dozen of such shells, if dropped into London, would probably be sufficient totally to wreck the metropolis and all that therein is in five or six minutes. Hitherto dynamite shells have not come within the category of practical warfare, for the simple reason that they are as dangerous to those who fire them off as to the objects they are meant to destroy. They cannot be fired with powder from an ordinary gun with any degree of safety, because the shock to the explosive is so violent that as a rule the dynamite goes off before it is clear of the gun, with disastrous results to everyone and everything surrounding it.

But a certain Captain Zalinski has invented a cannon from which dynamite can be fired without any danger except to those against whom it is directed. In the Zalinski gun the dynamite or melinite, instead of being fired by a charge of gunpowder, is projected from the gun by the force of compressed air. It is, in fact, nothing more or less than a pneumatic cannon. In addition to other obvious advantages, the inventor of the pneumatic gun claims for it that it is perfectly noiseless. The weapon is about twenty yards long, and is supported by girders, which give it somewhat the appearance of a small railway bridge.

In point of sheer ghoulishness no war crank has come within measurable distance of one Richard S. Cantle, an American doctor, who made himself very prominent at the time of the Spanish-American war by his persevering attempt to induce the American Government to adopt his method of destroying their foes. Doctor Cantle was pursuing the peaceful tenor of his medical studies when he was drawn into the bypaths of destructiveness by devoting his attention too exclusively to the power wielded by the nimble microbe. Certain politicians in this country are continually advocating public granaries for the storage of Wheat in case of our ports being blockaded. Doctor Cantle also urged the necessity for public storehouses, but these storehouses were not to contain wheat, but microbes. In time of war sundry air-tight vessels containing a carefully selected assortment of the most deadly microbes known to the faculty were to be conveyed in balloons to the neighbourhood of the enemy; when they were to be scattered broadcast over every encampment, with the result that within a week every soldier in the hostile army would be either dead or dying. For this purpose he strongly advocated that special attention should be paid to the cultivation of the cholera germ, that particular microbe being able to do more incurable mischief in a given time than any of his destructive species. Though the United States Government persistently turned a deaf ear to the voice of this charmer, Doctor Cantle still hopes that in a more enlightened age his great invention may be appreciated at its true worth. He has actually gone so far as to obtain a patent for the receptacles for his death-dealers. These to the ordinary observer look exactly like the hand-grenades for extinguishing fire one sees in most hotels; but Doctor Cantle, by some peculiar process of his own, has rendered them absolutely air-tight—a most necessary precaution, as an aperture a thousand times smaller than a pin’s head would be quite sufficient to let loose enough of the contents of his flagons to exterminate ten generations of war cranks. If it were
“BELOW THE SURFACE NOTHING CAN BE SEEN.” not that the war crank seldom troubles his head about mere facts, it might have occurred to the scientist that microbes are no respecters of persons, and the flagons would be as fatal to friends as to foes.

“A CAREFULLY SELECTED ASSORTMENT OF THE MOST DEADLY MICROBES.”